{"id":62551,"date":"2026-02-02T09:00:40","date_gmt":"2026-02-02T14:00:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/?p=62551"},"modified":"2026-02-01T21:43:21","modified_gmt":"2026-02-02T02:43:21","slug":"on-this-day-february-2-18821922","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/?p=62551","title":{"rendered":"On This Day: February 2, 1882\/1922"},"content":{"rendered":"

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\n“I was on the platform, my heart going like the locomotive, as the train from Dijon came slowly to a standstill and I saw the conductor getting off, holding a parcel and looking around for someone — me. In a few minutes, I was ringing the doorbell at the Joyces’ and handing them Copy No. 1 of Ulysses. It was February 2, 1922.”
\n— Sylvia Beach, publisher of Ulysses<\/i><\/big><\/p>\n

February 2 was also the day James Joyce was born in Rathgar, 1882. <\/p>\n

Joyce always looked for patterns. The symmetry of those two events happening on the same day – his birthday, and the publication of the book it took him 7 years to write (“If it took me 7 years to write it, people can spend 7 years reading it.”) … was not a coincidence. <\/p>\n

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Quotes about Ulysses<\/i> <\/h2>\n

Joyce wrote:<\/p>\n

Ulysses<\/em> is the epic of two races (Israel – Ireland) and at the same time the cycle of the human body as well as a little story of a day (life). The character of Ulysses always fascinated me ever since boyhood. I started writing it as a short story for Dubliners<\/em> fifteen years ago but gave it up. For seven years I have been working at this book– blast it!<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

While James Joyce was a modernist, and the Alpha Dog of the first artistic generation influenced by Freudian ideas, he insisted that what he was up to was not about underlying motives, or psychology at all:<\/p>\n

Why all this fuss and bother about the mystery of the unconscious? What about the mystery of the conscious? What do they know about that?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

My favorite quote from Joyce about Ulysses<\/i> is the following:<\/p>\n

The pity is that the public will demand and find a moral in my book, or worse they may take it in some serious way, and on the honour of a gentleman, there is not one single serious word in it.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

While you have to take this with a grain of salt (he is Irish, after all), I found myself remembering his comment the first time I was reading Ulysses<\/i> and it helped me relax. The book’s reputation precedes it. It is a Great Book, about Big Themes, like Death and Sex and Religion and Fathers and War and History. But if you read it in a serious way, the book will remain closed to you. Ulysses<\/i> is many things, but the main thing that it is is hilarious<\/i>. It’s a lark, a joke, a long pun, a riff … it features petty gossip, chatting barmaids, multiple farts, dirty jokes, bowel movements, limp penises, chamber pots, menstruation accidents, and masturbation (male AND female). I mean, in the first episode where we meet the lead character Leopold Bloom, he takes the newspaper to the outhouse and enjoys a satisfying dump as he thinks about his upcoming day. If you say that you have never done such a thing, you are lying and not to be trusted<\/i>. Perhaps you admit that you, on occasion, do such things, but you don’t think literature should portray it. Well, you can feel that way, but let us part ways. I do not mean to suggest that Ulysses<\/i> is not serious or great. It’s just that its reputation is intimidating. Don’t be intimidated. <\/p>\n

Remember Joyce’s words, and proceed accordingly.<\/p>\n

\n\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Nora Tully describes the reaction to Ulysses<\/i> upon its publication:<\/p>\n

The response to Ulysses<\/em> was immediate and extreme. Writer and literary critic Malcolm Cowley described it using the metaphor of a stone dropped into water: there was a moment of silence, the stone was dropped, “then all the frogs who inhabited the pool began to talk at once”.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Yeats (an early champion of Joyce) had this as his first response on reading Ulysses<\/i>: “A mad book!”<\/p>\n

Then later, as he let the book percolate, Yeats corrected himself: “I have made a terrible mistake. It is a work perhaps of genius. I now perceive its coherence … It is an entirely new thing — neither what the eye sees nor the ear hears, but what the rambling mind thinks and imagines from moment to moment. He has certainly surpassed in intensity any novelist of our time.”<\/p>\n

Hart Crane said: “I feel like shouting EUREKA! Easily the epic of the age.”<\/p>\n

George Bernard Shaw was disturbed by Ulysses<\/i>, he took it personally, he did not like what it revealed – about man, about Irish men, about the life of Ireland, but he grappled with the implications in an honest way: “If a man holds up a mirror to your nature and shows you that it needs washing — not whitewashing — it is no use breaking the mirror. Go for soap and water.”<\/p>\n

T.S. Eliot was especially devastated by the book, and his comments on it are numerous. Examples: “How could anyone write again after achieving the immense prodigy of the last chapter?”<\/p>\n

T.S. Eliot again: “I hold Ulysses <\/i>to be the most important expression which the present age has found; it is a book to which we are all indebted, and from which none of us can escape.”<\/p>\n

Edmund Wilson wrote of it:<\/p>\n

The more we read Ulysses<\/i>, the more we are convinced of its psychological truth, and the more we are amazed at Joyce’s genius in mastering and in presenting, not through analysis or generalization, but by the complete recreation of life in the process of being lived, the relations of human beings to their environment and to each other; the nature of their perception of what goes on about them and of what goes on within themselves; and the interdependence of their intellectual, their physical, their professional and their emotional lives. To have traced all these interdependences, to have given each of these elements its value, yet never to have lost sight of the moral through preoccuptation with the physical, nor to have forgotten the general in the particular; to have exhibited ordinary humanity without either satirizing it or sentimentalizing it – this would already have been sufficiently remarkable; but to have subdued all this material to the uses of a supremely finished and disciplined work of art is a feat which has hardly been equalled in the literature of our time.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Wilson also wrote:<\/p>\n

Yet for all its appalling longeurs, Ulysses<\/i> is a work of high genius. Its importance seems to me to lie, not so much in its opening new doors to knowledge — unless in setting an example to Anglo-Saxon writers of putting down everything without compunction — or in inventing new literary forms — Joyce’s formula is really, as I have indicated, nearly seventy-five years old — as in its once more setting the standard of the novel so high that it need not be ashamed to take its place beside poetry and drama. Ulysses<\/i> has the effect at once of making everything else look brassy.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Carl Jung read the book and wrote Joyce a letter:<\/p>\n

Dear Sir,
\nYour Ulysses has presented the world such an upsetting psychological problem, that repeatedly I have been called in as a supposed authority on psychological matters.<\/p>\n

Ulysses proved to be an exceedingly hard nut and it has forced my mind not only to most unusual efforts, but also to rather extravagant peregrinations (speaking from the standpoint of a scientist). Your book as a whole has given me no end of trouble and I was brooding over it for about three years until I succeeded to put myself into it. But I must tell you that I’m profoundly grateful to yourself as well as to your gigantic opus, because I learned a great deal from it. I shall probably never be quite sure whether I did enjoy it, because it meant too much grinding of nerves and of grey matter. I also don’t know whether you will enjoy what I have written about Ulysses because I couldn’t help telling the world how much I was bored, how I grumbled, how I cursed and how I admired. The 40 pages of non stop run at the end is a string of veritable psychological peaches. I suppose the devil’s grandmother knows so much about the real psychology of a woman, I didn’t.<\/p>\n

Well I just try to recommend my little essay to you, as an amusing attempt of a perfect stranger that went astray in the labyrinth of your Ulysses and happened to get out of it again by sheer good luck. At all events you may gather from my article what Ulysses has done to a supposedly balanced psychologist.<\/p>\n

With the expression of my deepest appreciation, I remain, dear Sir,<\/p>\n

Yours faithfully,
\nC.G. Jung<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Joyce was very proud of this letter and would read it out loud to guests in his house. Nora would snort at the end, “Jimmy knows nothin’<\/i> about women!”<\/p>\n

Katherine Mansfield wrote in a letter:<\/p>\n

“Joyce was rather … difficile. I had no idea until then of his view of Ulysses — no idea how closely it was modelled on the Greek story, how absolutely necessary it was to know the one through and through to be able to discuss the other. I’ve read the Odyssey and am more or less familiar with it but Murry [Mansfield’s husband] and Joyce simply sailed out of my depth. I felt almost stupefied. It’s absolutely impossible that other people should understand Ulysses as Joyce understands it. It’s almost revolting to hear him discuss its difficulties. It contains code words that must be picked up in each paragraph and so on. The Question and Answer part can be read astronomically or from the geologic standpoint or — oh, I don’t know!”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The most humorous part of this is that Joyce said, after meeting Katherine and her husband:<\/p>\n

“Mrs. Murry understood the book better than her husband.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Hilarious.<\/p>\n

George Moore, another Irish writer, wrote:<\/p>\n

“Ulysses is hopeless; it is absurd to imagine that any good end can be served by trying to record every single thought and sensation of any human being. That’s not art, it’s like trying to copy the London Directory.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Hemingway wrote in a letter to Sherwood Anderson:<\/p>\n

“Joyce has a most goddamn wonderful book. It’ll probably reach you in time. Meantime the report is that he and all his family are starving but you can find the whole celtic crew of them every night in Michaud’s where Binney and I can only afford to go about once a week…The damned Irish, they have to moan about something or other…”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Gertrude Stein wrote:<\/p>\n

“Joyce is good. He is a good writer. People like him because he is incomprehensible and anybody can understand him. But who came first, Gertrude Stein or James Joyce? Do not forget that my first great book, Three Lives, was published in 1908. That was long before Ulysses. But Joyce has done something. His influence, however, is local. Like Synge, another Irish writer, he has had his day.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Joyce heard what Stein wrote, thought about it, and said, “I hate intellectual women.”<\/p>\n

George Bernard Shaw again:<\/p>\n

“I have read several fragments of Ulysses … It is a revolting record of a disgusting phase of civilization; but it is a truthful one; and I should like to put a cordon round Dublin; round up every male person in it between the ages of 15 and 30; force them to read it; and ask them whether on reflection they could see anything amusing in all that foul mouthed foul minded derision and obscenity…It is, however, some consolation to find that at last somebody has felt deeply enough about it to face the horror of writing it all down and using his literary genius to force people to face it. In Ireland they try to make a cat cleanly by rubbing its nose in its own filth. Mr. Joyce has tried the same treatment on the human subject.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Ezra Pound said:<\/p>\n

“Joyce — pleasing; after the first shell of cantankerous Irishman, I got the impression that the real man is the author of Chamber Music, the sensitive. The rest is the genius; the registration of realities on the temperament, the delicate temperament of the early poems. A concentration and absorption passing Yeats’ — Yeats has never taken on anything requiring the condensation of Ulysses.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

William Carlos Williams wrote (echoing what many of Joyce’s contemporaries felt):<\/p>\n

“Joyce is too near for me to want to do less than he did in Ulysses<\/em>, in looseness of spirit, and honesty of heart — at least.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

E.M. Forster wrote:<\/p>\n

“Perhaps the most interesting literary experiment of our day.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Dr. Joseph Collins reviewed “Ulysses” in The New York Times and wrote:<\/p>\n

Ulysses<\/em> will immortalize its author with the same certainty that Gargantua and Pantagruel immortalized Rabelais and The Brothers Karamazov Dostoevsky … It comes nearer to being the perfect revelation of a personality than any book in existence.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Hart Crane, who had totally lost his head about the book, wrote:<\/p>\n

“The sharp beauty and sensitivity of the thing! The matchless details! His book is steeped in the Elizabethans, his early love, and Latin Church, and some Greek … It is my opinion that some fanatic will kill Joyce sometime soon for the wonderful things said in Ulysses.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Ford Madox Ford wrote:<\/p>\n

“For myself then, the pleasure — the very great pleasure — that I get from going through the sentences of Mr. Joyce is that given me simply by the cadence of his prose, and I fancy that the greatest and highest enjoyment that can be got from any writing is simply that given by the cadence of the prose.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Toni Morrison:<\/p>\n

Joyce … moved here and there, but he wrote about Ireland whereever he was, didn’t care where he was. I am sure people said to him, Why …? Maybe the French asked, When you gonna write about Paris?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

William Faulkner wrote:<\/p>\n

You should approach Joyce’s Ulysses<\/em> as the illiterate Baptist preacher approaches the Old Testament: with faith.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Vladimir Nabokov wrote:<\/p>\n

Ulysses, of course, is a divine work of art and will live on despite the academic nonentities who turn it into a collection of symbols or Greek myths. I once gave a student a C-minus, or perhaps a D-plus, just for applying to its chapters the titles borrowed from Homer while not even noticing the comings and goings of the man in the brown mackintosh. He didn’t even know who the man in the brown mackintosh was. Oh, yes, let people compare me to Joyce by all means, but my English is pat ball to Joyce’s champion game.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

My notes in the opening pages of my battered copy of Ulysses<\/i>.<\/p>\n

\n\"560019406_ccebd977d2_z\"<\/a><\/p>\n

In 2008, at around this time my father gave me his rare copy of Ulysses<\/i>, part of the 1924 printing of Shakespeare & Co. My mother had given it to my father as a gift. The book is falling apart. The pages are thin and rustly, and little bits of them drop off if you flip through the pages. It is enclosed in a box, to protect it – which has on the spine: ULYSSES – PARIS, 1924.<\/p>\n

It is one of my most treasured possessions.<\/p>\n

Happy birthday to Jimmy Joyce and to Ulysses<\/i>, his entertaining masterpiece, the book that “killed the 19th century”.<\/p>\n

Quotes about Joyce<\/strong><\/h2>\n

Evelyn Waugh:<\/strong><\/p>\n

Experiment? God forbid! Look at the results of experiment in the case of a writer like Joyce. He started off writing very well, then you can watch him going mad with vanity. He ends up a lunatic.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Ralph Ellison:<\/strong><\/p>\n

The use of ritual is equally a vital part of the creative process. I learned a few things from Eliot, Joyce, and Hemingway, but not how to adapt them. When I started writing, I knew that in both The Waste Land<\/em> and Ulysses<\/em>, ancient myth and ritual were used to give form and significance to the material; but it took me a few years to realize that the myths and rites which we find functioning in our everyday lives could be used in the same way. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Saul Bellow:<\/strong><\/p>\n

“Serious realism also contrasts the common man with aristocratic greatness. He is overborne by fate, just as the great are in Shakespeare and Sophocles. But this contrast, inherent in literary tradition, always damages him. In the end the force of tradition carries realism into parody, satire, mock epic – Leopold Bloom.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Toni Morrison:<\/strong><\/p>\n

It’s very important to me that my work be African-American; if it assimilates into a different or larger pool, so much the better. But I shouldn’t be asked<\/em> to do that. Joyce is not asked to do that. Tolstoy is not. I mean, they can all be Russian, French, Irish, or Catholic, they write out of where they came from, and I do too.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Ernest Hemingway:<\/strong><\/p>\n

“Joyce was a very great writer and he would only explain what he was doing to jerks. Other writers that he respected were supposed to be able to know what he was doing by reading it.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Saul Bellow:<\/strong><\/p>\n

“I have a special interest in Joyce; I have a special interest in Lawrence. I read certain poets over and over again. I can’t say where they belong in my theoretical scheme; I only know that I have an attachment to them. Yeats is one such poet. Hart Crane is another. Hardy and Walter de la Mare. I don’t know what these have in common – probably nothing. I know that I am drawn repeatedly to these men.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

T.S. Eliot:<\/strong><\/p>\n

“You have to say the thing the difficult way. The only alternative is not saying it at all, at that stage … These things, however, become easier to people with time. You get used to having The Waste Land<\/em>, or Ulysses<\/em>, about.” <\/p><\/blockquote>\n

John Gardner:<\/strong><\/p>\n

I have learned a few things from slightly contemporary writers. About symbols, for instance. If you stop with James Joyce, you may write a slightly goofy kind of symbolic novel. Joyce’s fondness for the “mannered” is the least of it. At the time Joyce was writing, people were less attuned than they are now to symbolic writing, so he sometimes let himself get away with bald, obvious symbols<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Truman Capote :<\/strong><\/p>\n

“Writing has laws of perspective, of light and shade, just as painting does, or music. If you are born knowing them, fine. If not, learn them. Then rearrange the rules to suit yourself. Even Joyce, our most extreme disregarder, was a superb craftsman; he could write Ulysses<\/em> because<\/em> he could write Dubliners<\/em>.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Joyce Carol Oates:<\/strong><\/p>\n

Joyce said of the underlying structure of Ulysses<\/em> – the Odyssesean parallel and parody – that he really didn’t care whether it was plausible so long as it served as a bridge to get his “soldiers” across. Once they were across, what does it matter if the bridge collapses?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

From Paris Review<\/i> 1958 interview with Ernest Hemingway:
\nInterviewer<\/strong>: When you are writing, do you ever find yourself influenced by what you’re reading at the time?
\nHemingway<\/strong>: Not since Joyce was writing Ulysses<\/em>. His was not a direct influence. But in those days when words we knew were barred to us, and we had to fight for a single word, the influence of his work was what changed everything, and made it possible for us to break away from the restrictions.<\/p>\n

Toni Morrison:<\/strong><\/p>\n

It’s amazing how certain kinds of irony and humor travel. Sometimes Joyce is hilarious. I read Finnegans Wake after graduate school and I had the great good fortune of reading it without any help. I don’t know if I read it right, but it was hilarious! I laughed constantly! I didn’t know what was going on for whole blocks but it didn’t matter because I wasn’t going to be graded on it.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Jorge Luis Borges:<\/strong><\/p>\n

“I think that Eliot and Joyce wanted their readers to be rather mystified and so to be worrying out the sense of what they had done.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

William Styron: <\/strong><\/p>\n

I’d say I’ve been influenced as much, though, by Joyce and Flaubert [as by Faulkner]. Old Joyce and Flaubert have influenced me stylistically, given me arrows, but then a lot of the contemporary works I’ve read have influenced me as a craftsman. Dos Passos, Scott Fitzgerald, both have been valuable in teaching me how to write the novel, but not many of these modern people have contributed much to my emotional climate. Joyce comes closest, but the strong influences are out of the past – the Bible, Marlowe, Blake, Shakespeare.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Robert Stone:<\/strong><\/p>\n

“Many writers of my generation, which was spared television in its youth, grew up with their sense of narrative influenced by the structure of film. And you can go back much further to see that. Joyce, for example. Interestingly, Dickens seems to have anticipated the shape of the movies – look at the first few pages of Great Expectations<\/em>.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Gabriel Garc\u00eda M\u00e1rquez:<\/strong><\/p>\n

I read Ulysses in the only Spanish edition available. Since then, after having read Ulysses in English as well as a very good French translation, I can see that the original Spanish translation was very bad. But I did learn something that was to be very useful to me in my future writing – the technique of the interior monologue. I later found this in Virginia Woolf, and I like the way she uses it better than Joyce.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Raymond Carver on literary influences:<\/strong><\/p>\n

Ernest Hemingway is one. The early stories. “Big Two-Hearted River,” “Cat in the Rain,” “The Three-Day Blow,” “Soldier’s Home,” lots more. Chekhov. I suppose he’s the writer whose work I most admire. But who doesn’t like Chekhov? I’m talking about his stories now, not the plays. His plays move too slowly for me. Tolstoy. Any of his short stories, novellas, and Anna Karenina<\/em>. Not War and Peace<\/em>. Too slow. But The Death of Ivan Ilyich, Master and Man<\/em>, “How Much Land Does a Man Need?” Tolstoy is the best there is. Isaac Babel, Flannery O’Connor, Frank O’Connor, James Joyce’s Dubliners<\/em>.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Saul Bellow:<\/strong><\/p>\n

“The modern masterpiece of confusion is Joyce’s Ulysses<\/em>. There the mind is unable to resist experience. Experience in all its diversity, its pleasure and horror, passes through Bloom’s head like an ocean through a sponge. The sponge can’t resist; it has to accept whatever the waters bring. It also notes every microorganism that passes through it. This is what I mean. How much of this must the spirit suffer, in what detail is it obliged to receive this ocean with its human plankton? Sometimes it looks as if the power of the mind has been nullified by the volume of experiences. But of course this is assuming the degree of passivity that Joyce assumes in Ulysses<\/em>.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Toni Morrison:<\/strong><\/p>\n

Sex is difficult to write about because it’s just not sexy enough. The only way to write about it is not to write much. Let the reader bring his own sexuality into the text. A writer I usually admire has written about sex in the most off-putting way. There is just too much information. If you start saying “the curve of…” you soon sound like a gynecologist. Only Joyce could get away with that. He said all those forbidden words. He said cunt<\/em>, and that was shocking. The forbidden word can be provocative. But after a while it becomes monotonous rather than arousing. Less is always better.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

William Styron: <\/strong><\/p>\n

I’m all for the complexity of Faulkner, but not for the confusion. That goes for Joyce, too. All that fabulously beautiful poetry in the last part of Finnegans Wake is pretty much lost to the world simply because not many people are ever going to put up with the chaos that precedes it.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Saul Bellow:<\/strong><\/p>\n

“Let us look at one of the dominant ideas of the century, accepted by many modern artists – the idea that humankind has reached a terminal point. We find this terminal assumption in writers like Joyce, C\u00e9line, Thomas Mann. In Doktor Faustus<\/em> politics and art are joined by the destruction of civilization. Now here is an idea, found in some of the greatest novels of the 20th century. How good is this idea? Frightful things have happened, but is the apocalyptic interpretation true? The terminations did not fully terminate. Civilization is still here. The prophecies have not been borne out. Novelists are wrong to put an interpretation of history at the base of artistic creation – to speak ‘the last word.’ It is better that the novelist should trust his own sense of life. Less ambitious. More likely to tell the truth.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Joyce Carol Oates:<\/strong><\/p>\n

But experimentation for its own sake doesn’t much interest me. It seems to belong to the early sixties, when Dadaism was being rediscoverd. In a sense we are all post-Wake<\/em> writers and it’s Joyce, and only Joyce, who casts a long terrifying shadow … The problem is that virtuoso writing appeals to the intellect and tends to leave one’s emotions untouched. When I read aloud to my students the last few pages of Finnegans Wake<\/em>, and come to that glorious, and heartbreaking, final section (“But you’re changing, acoolsha, you’re changing from me, I can feel”), I think I’m able to communicate the almost overwhelmingly beautiful emotion behind it, and the experience certainly leaves me<\/i> shaken, but it would be foolish to think that the average reader, even the average intelligent reader, would be willing to labor at the Wake<\/em>, through those hundreds of dense pages, in order to obtain an emotional and spiritual sense of the work’s wholeness, as well as its genius. Joyce’s Ulysses<\/em> appeals to me more: That graceful synthesis of the “naturalistic” and the “Symbolic” suits my temperament …<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Seamus Heaney: <\/strong><\/p>\n

A great writer within any culture changes everything. Because the thing is different afterwards and people comprehend themselves differently. If you take Ireland before James Joyce and Ireland fifty years afterwards, the reality of being part of the collective life is enhanced and changed. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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\nThank you so much for stopping by. If you like what I do, and if you feel inclined to support my work, here’s a link to my Venmo account<\/a>. And I’ve launched a Substack, Sheila Variations 2.0<\/a>, if you’d like to subscribe.<\/em> <\/small><\/p>\n